True story: I proposed to my wife at an IHOP.  There was a combination of factors for why I did so at that particular place.  Part of it was I had never seen one before, and I always thought they were supposed to look like that kitsch Swiss chalet design they apparently stopped using a […]

For a few months of my time in the third grade I lived in Tucumcari, New Mexico.  It is the only time I have even visited the deserts of the southwest, and my memories of that brief time are so strange as to make it feel as if I am somehow recalling somebody else’s memories.  […]

There were some strong trends in the early 1980’s which identify a picture as being of that vintage.  There was a significant increase in gore of the likes one had not previously seen in the output of the major studios.  You also had much stronger sexual content that had been in such fare previously.  And, […]

Jennie Linden is having recurring nightmares about her insane mother, a woman currently committed to an asylum after stabbing to death Linden’s father on the girl’s birthday several years ago.  Now Linden is seeing what appears to be the woman out and about and, on a particular night, walking around the family mansion.  Linden follows […]

As a rather hardline skeptic, I have little tolerance for nonsense masquerading as science.  I was of the right age at the end of the 1970’s to be aware of such trends of the time as biorhythms and astrology.  The latter was quite popular, though I suspect largely because asking somebody for their sign was […]

Simone Simon had quite a screen presence.  The original Cat People would have been unlikely to have caused as much of a stir with anybody but her in the lead.  Simon tended to be cast as mysterious figures who seemingly come from places beyond the mortal realm.  The most intriguing moment in All That Money […]

Dear weirdo writing under a pseudonym: I am an imaginary eight-year-old girl.  Some of my friends say 1985’s Santa Claus: The Movie isn’t a cynical piece of shit and a desperate cash grab, but is something they fondly remember from their own childhood.  Is that true?  Also, why am I hanging out with people older […]

1955’s We’re No Angels is my new appointed winner of the weirdest and least appropriate Christmas movie I have seen.  Humphrey Bogart, Aldo Ray and Peter Ustinov play three convicts who have escaped the prison on Devil’s Island in 1895.  While trying to figure out a way onto any boat bound for Paris, Bogey fills […]

I don’t believe in witchcraft, yet I saved in a journal the last whisker and claw saved from our cat Sebastian before he passed on.  With these, I included the bandage which had been on his leg on his last visit to the vet.  In text which reads creepier than intended, I wrote that “with […]

Cats can be monsters on their own.  Just look at feral cat colonies.  People can be monsters on their own as well, which I think goes without saying.  Together, cats and people tend to improve each other, bringing out the better nature of each.  Still, there are many times I wish I could be a […]

Home invasion thrillers make me uneasy, yet even I had difficulty losing myself in 1955’s The Night Holds Terror.  The night may hold some tension and terror, but the days turn out to be tedious and eye-rollingly ridiculous. As the opening narration goes to great pains to inform the audience, this is based on a […]

Even people who have never seen a black and white film have likely heard of Bogart or Cagney.  Unfortunately, few people today would recognize the name Broderick Crawford, though this actor of surprising range turned in great performances in many noirs. One of those was in 1951’s The Mob, where he is a beat cop […]

Alastair Sim was a treasure.  I have yet to see a movie which wasn’t improved upon by his presence.  Naturally, some of those pictures are better than others.  1954’s The Belles of St. Trinian’s is a tour-de-force for the actor, with him in dual roles as the Millicent Fritton and her brother Clarence.  To keep […]

As I write this, the U.S. is currently performing mass deportations, more often than not to countries with poor humanitarian track records and where those deportees do not have a history.  When they arrive at their destinations, they are put in the kinds of prisons where people never leave except in a coffin.  One wonders […]